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Donald Trump likes to talk about how he "inherited a mess": here's
one measure of that, a chart of private-sector payroll employment over
Obama's eight years:

Note first that the guy who really did inherit a mess was Obama,
following eight years of Republican misrule under GW Bush. Also, that
by ignoring cuts to public sector employment due to austerity measures
mostly (but not exclusively) pushed by Republicans, this overstates
the overall jobs gains a bit. Still, Trump's going to be hard-pressed
to sustain Obama's rate, given hat he's working with the same "wrecking
crew" that sunk Bush. Of course, you may not know all this, because
Obama spent very little time bitching about the hole Republicans dug
for him: he felt it important to recovery to project confidence, so
he consistently understated the recession early on. In doing so, he
did himself (and the country) a disservice, as he undercut the political
case for more emphatic reforms.

I've featured these pieces every week since inauguration, but frankly
the "federal rule" broken in the last point is a really stupid one, on
the order of misusing a comma in a press release. As the rest of this
post shows, there was much more amiss in the Trump world this week --
the purge of federal prosecutors, for instance, which shows the extent
to which partisan politics has taken over law enforcement in the minds
of Republican strategists.

Paul Ryan isn't an amateur. He is, arguably, the most skilled policy
entrepreneur of his generation. He is known for winning support from
political actors and policy validators who normally reject his brand of
conservatism. The backing he's built for past proposals comes from
painstaking work talking to allies, working on plans with them, preparing
them for what he'll release, hearing out their concerns, constructing
processes where they feel heard, and so on. He's good at this kind of
thing.

The implication is that since he didn't do all that this time he
must not be serious about it.
Paul Krugman has a response:

But has Ryan ever put together major legislation with any real chance
of passage? Yes, he made a name for himself with big budget proposals
that received adoring press coverage. But these were never remotely
operational -- they were filled not just with magic asterisks -- tax
loophole closing to be determined later, cost savings to be achieved
via means to be determined later -- but with elements, like converting
Medicare into a voucher system, that would have drawn immense flack if
they got anywhere close to actually happening.

In other words, he has never offered real plans for overhauling
social insurance, just things that sound like plans but are basically
just advertisements for some imaginary plan that might eventually be
produced. Actually pulling together a coalition to get stuff done? Has
he ever managed that?

What I'd say is that Ryan is not, in fact, a policy entrepreneur.
He's just a self-promoter, someone who has successfully sold a credulous
media on a character he plays: Paul Ryan, Serious, Honest Conservative
Policy Wonk. This is really his first test at real policymaking, which
is a very different process. There's nothing strange about his inability
to pull off the real thing, as opposed to the act. . . .

In other words, maybe this looks like amateur hour because it is.
Ryan isn't a skilled politician inexplicably losing his touch, he's a
con artist who started to believe his own con; Republicans didn't hammer
out a workable plan because there is no such plan, and anyway they have
no idea what that would involve.

Or to put it another way, this could just be more malevolence tempered
by incompetence.

Trump's ascendancy has made visible a plague of deep-seated civic
illiteracy, a corrupt political system and a contempt for reason
that has been decades in the making. It also points to the withering
of civic attachments, the decline of public life and the use of
violence and fear to shock and numb everyday people. Galvanizing
his base of true-believers in post-election rallies, the country
witnesses how politics is transformed into a spectacle of fear,
divisions and disinformation. Under President Trump, the scourge
of mid-20th century authoritarianism has returned, not only in the
menacing plague of populist rallies, fear-mongering, hate and
humiliation, but also in an emboldened culture of war, militarization
and violence that looms over society like a rising storm.

Betsy DeVos' father, Edgar Prince, made his fortune manufacturing auto
parts (including perhaps his greatest innovation, the lighted sun visor),
and was one of the single largest donors to the Christian right. "No one
in the United States gave more money to James Dobson's Focus on the Family,
its Michigan Family Forum affiliate or its Washington, D.C., arm, the
Family Research Council, than the late Edgar Prince," notes Russ Bellant,
a Michigan author who has written extensively about the religious right.
After Prince died in 1995, Betsy's mother, Elsa Prince Broekhuizen,
continued funding religious-right causes, as has Betsy's brother, Erik
Prince, founder of the military contractor Blackwater. Among the causes
the Dick and Betsy DeVos Family Foundation has supported is the Foundation
for Traditional Values, which produced multi-media seminars and presentations
on "America's Judeo-Christian heritage," including the "biblical roots" of
government and our education system.

And some stuff you probably did:

Neither Betsy DeVos, who is 59, nor any of her children have ever attended
a public school; her Cabinet post also marks her first full-time job in the
education system. Even before her nomination, she was a controversial figure
in education circles, a leading advocate of "school choice" through student
vouchers, which give parents public dollars to send their children to private
and parochial schools.

There is also a quote from Trump calling school choice the "civil rights
issue of our time." Admittedly, not a fellow well known for his devotion to
civil rights.

Also a few links less directly tied to Trump, though sometimes still
to America's bout of political insanity:

Bernard Avishai: It's Not Too Early for the Next Democratic Ticket:
Dude, it's way too fucking early. In fact, the subject should be zipped
until way after the 2018 elections, and I wish we could put it off until
well into 2020: partly because it'll do nothing but distract the press
from the real issues, but mostly because the next candidate should
represent the party, not usurp the party to stroke her or his ego
(which is what being the designated leader would do).

Dean Baker: Drugs Are Cheap: Why Do We Let Governments Make Them Expensive?
It's worth remembering that private health insurance was quick to add
pharmaceutical coverage to their plans because drug therapies were often
cheaper than medical interventions. Medicare was slow to follow suit,
and by the time they did drugs weren't so cheap any more. The price rise
was partly the effect of more money being available through insurance,
and partly the increasing callousness of the profit motive, but to cash
in the key has been government-granted patent monopolies, which give
companies the right to push patients (and insurers) to their limits --
a "right" they've lately been exploiting so universally it's become a
major driver of health care cost. There is an easy fix to this, and a
little public investment would more than make up for any reductions
companies might make to r&d.

Thomas Frank: The Revolution Will Not Be Curated: There must be a
better word for what he's getting at, but the people he's talking about
are those who sort and select things (originally art) to be presented
to larger groups of people (originally exhibitions). To call these people
filters suggests they're more passive than they in fact are. Another word
that comes to mind is experts, but that suggests they know more than most
seem to, and that they work by some relatively objective criteria which
we should respect -- in fact, many people who call themselves experts
are distinguished mostly by their partisan support for special interests.
Obviously, much can go wrong with all this curating, but it's impossible
to be broadly informed without tapping into intermediaries who pay much
more attention to specialists. Virtually all of the links in this post
came to my attention through curators I've found worthwhile, and if
you're reading this you're doing the same. Indeed, that makes me a
curator, as I suppose I am in other domains, such as recorded jazz.
Still not sure what Frank's title means, unless it's that in order to
break out of today's debilitating conventional wisdom you have to be
aware of how all this curating limits your options, and seek out info
beyond the commonplace. But as a practical matter, that just means
that you need to find better curators (and, I would add, hold them
to account).

Rich Montgomery/Andian Cummings: Arcs of two lives intersect in tragedy
at Austins bar in Olathe: Profiles of the Trump-inspired shooter
(Adam W. Purinton: "51, had long since seen his career as an air traffic
controller come to an end, gaining a reputation as an unhappy drinker as
he drifted from one low-level job to another") and victim (Srinivas
Kuchibbotla, 32, an engineer who had immigrated from Hyderabad, India;
he "had the American dream in his grasp: great job, happy marriage,
new house and plans for children"). Of course, Trump's spokespeople
were quick to disavow the shooting, but aside from its ending (which
they'd prefer to leave ambiguous) the whole Trump campaign was based
on exploiting the frustrations of folks like Purinton and rallying
their furor against people like Kuchibbotla. And it certainly is the
case that American businesses prefer hiring brilliant and optimistic
foreign-born professionals to trying to train undereducated and aging
malcontents like Purinton. We live in a society where even such paltry
welfare efforts as we make are more meant to belittle beneficiaries
than to build them up, so it's easy to see how Trump's supporters can
think the system favors immigrants over natives. And Democrats, having
taken every side of the issue (including for the Clintons a leading
roll in "ending welfare as we know it"), have had no coherent message,
allowing Trump to exploit this simmering wrath -- and to stir it up,
as we see here.

The Vault 7 leaks are not exactly a smoking gun for those who maintain
Russia's innocence where the DNC hacks and leaks are concerned -- but
they're not insignificant either. If anything, the new leaks should make
people think a little harder before putting their complete trust in the
CIA's public conclusions about the acts (or alleged acts) of enemy
states. . . .

The fact that the CIA -- an organization of professionals trained
in the most sophisticated methods of deception -- is front and center
promoting the idea that Assange is a Russian agent, should be enough
for anyone to take that idea with a pinch of salt.